Skip to content

docs: Add macOS full build from source instructions #123

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
monsterwendy wants to merge 2 commits into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
Open

docs: Add macOS full build from source instructions #123

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
2 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
a57a784
docs: Add macOS full build from source instructions
Apr 28, 2026
90f34da
docs: Fix macOS build flags -- add Ninja, ENABLE_PLAYLIST, BUILD_SHAR…
Apr 28, 2026
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
42 changes: 42 additions & 0 deletions README.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -155,3 +155,45 @@ mkdir cmake-build
cmake -G Xcode -S . -B cmake-build -DCMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPES=Debug,Release
cmake --build cmake-build --config Release
```

#### macOS: Full build from source (including libprojectM)

Pre-built macOS binaries are not currently published. Use the following to build everything from source:

**Prerequisites**

```shell
xcode-select --install
brew install cmake ninja sdl2 poco freetype git
```

**1. Build and install libprojectM**

```shell
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm.git
cd projectm && mkdir cmake-build
cmake -G Ninja -S . -B cmake-build \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/dev/projectm-install \
-DENABLE_PLAYLIST=ON \
-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON
cmake --build cmake-build --parallel
cmake --install cmake-build
cd ..
```

**2. Build frontend-sdl2**

```shell
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/frontend-sdl2.git
cd frontend-sdl2 && mkdir cmake-build
cmake -G Ninja -S . -B cmake-build \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=~/dev/projectm-install \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/dev/projectm-app
cmake --build cmake-build --parallel
cmake --install cmake-build
```

`projectM.app` will be in `~/dev/projectm-app/`. Edit
`projectM.app/Contents/Resources/projectMSDL.properties` to set your preset and texture paths, then launch the app.